5 Dedupe Products Worth a Second Look

Posted on February 06, 2012 By Drew Robb

We've done a couple of articles about hot deduplication tools. But there are so many coming onto the market that we have another five to showcase. This may be the last time we look at these type of vendors, however, as the technology is on its way to becoming ubiquitous.

"Deduplication technology is now pretty much table stakes for vendors who want to sell into the enterprise," said Mike Karp, an analyst with PtakNoel Associates. "Obviously there are lots of ways of implementing this, but as is invariably the fastest way for any data center manager to get payback on storage investment. Vendors that don't have it at this point pretty much close themselves out of a great many deals."

That said, here are another five deduplication companies whose products merit attention.

1. Tintri

Tintri VMstore uses multi-level cell (MLC) flash and inline deduplication, compression and a flash/disk file system to run applications at flash-level performance. One customer uses it to run a 1TB database instance in 177GB of flash memory.

The Tintri VMstore T540 is its latest VM-aware storage appliance. This includes dual storage controllers and 13.5 TB of usable capacity in a 3U form factor to deliver sub-millisecond latency for hundreds of VMs.

"We've put a premium on engaging with the VM user community and identifying and addressing the biggest pain points with VM storage," said Kieran Harty, Tintri's CEO. "Features like bottleneck visualization and VM auto-alignment are tailored to the daily challenges that storage and VM admins face."

2. Cofio

Cofio combines source deduplication and target deduplication in a product called AIMstor. It dedupes within the data store and from the originating primary data source. The company recently introduced Smart-Remote-Sync (SRS) in AIMstor 2.5 to improve transfer times when moving data from one location to another via a WAN. This makes it a good option for remote office backup. SRS enables synchronization between multiple data repositories. Users can choose to perform hourly SRS transfers of application data or weekly SRS transfers of OS images if desired.

3. SolidFire

SolidFire Deduplication is done in concert with its thin provisioning and compression features to improve capacity utilization. It dedupes all data across a cluster in 4k blocks. Users can download its eScanner utility to find out how effective SolidFire would be in their environments.

4. Infortrend

Infortrend EonNAS Pro has been designed for an SME audience to conduct file sharing and perform data backup. It comes with ZFS-based corruption elimination, deduplication, snapshots and a pool mirror function for replication. It comes with dual-core Intel processors and has up to 24 TB of capacity.

According to Tony Chu, president at Infortrend, EonNAS comes in three versions, ranging from two to eight drive bays offering from 6 TB up to 24 TB.

5. Sepaton

Sepaton's S2100-ES2 with the latest version of Sepaton's DeltaStor software brings higher performance, multi-protocol support and deduplication. It also supports OST A.I.R., which enables it to integrate with NetBackup 7 environments. As a result, it can backup to disk without tape emulation, and streamline the backup and disaster recovery process.

The S2100-ES2 also comes with ContentAware technology that deduplicates progressive incremental backups and multi-streamed database backups. It also ingests data via Fibre Channel or 10 Gb Ethernet at up to 43.2 TB/hour. Eight compute nodes can be combined in one 1.6 PB usable system upgrade.

"All nodes work together for ingestion, deduplication and replication," said Linda Mentzer, vice president, product management and marketing. "Capacity can scale to 1.6 PB usable before any deduplication or hardware compression."

Deduplication Not Enough

Note above how many of these vendors combine deduplication with compression. They are far from unique. Many have realized the power of this one-two punch.

"The interesting thing happening here is how Dell, EMC, IBM and NetApp are figuring out how their real-time compression and dedupe products or functionality are complimentary versus competitive under the data footprint reduction umbrella," said Greg Schulz, an analyst at StorageIO Group.

Drew Robb is a freelance writer specializing in technology and engineering. Currently living in California, he is originally from Scotland, where he received a degree in geology and geography from the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Server Disk Management in a Windows Environment (CRC Press).

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